Had there been any really great men among our statesmen they would have discovered the cause of the alternate “ups and downs” in the prosperity of the country, and, at least, have attempted some remedy. But we may look in vain through the whole list of those who have, one after another, prominently occupied public attention, for a great mind in the sense of instituting reforms in government; in replacing vicious by beneficent legislation. Washington, who will always be deservedly revered, was in no sense a great man save in goodness. As a general or statesman he has been excelled by dozens since his time, not one of whom has left anything behind him that will make his name immortal. To be immortal in history requires that there shall be some basis for it living in the Government, or in the industrial habits of the people, or in their religious faiths or rites. Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, Mahomet among Mahomedans, and Jesus amongst Christians, have immortality. But the religious element, per se, never would have civilized the world. Indeed the nations most under the influence of religious sentiments have done the least to spread civilization into unknown countries. It is the warlike and intellectual, in contradistinction to the religious and æsthetic, nations to whom we owe the almost world-wide enlightenment of the present, while the latter have remained shut up within themselves, and are nothing but what their religion makes them. The contrast between Egypt and India or China is, in this respect, most striking. Egypt, becoming great at home, pushed out into the surrounding world. With its immense armies under Sesostris and its no less potent power emanating from the wise men who made the Alexandrian library a possibility, it left its impress so fixed upon the world that, even to this day, there are many things in the habits and customs of the nations, especially in their literature and philosophies, that are Egyptian. It was an Egyptian colony which laid the foundation in Greece at Athens for the splendid civilization that was there developed; for the glory, the military renown and the arts and sciences that afterwards made Greece at once the admiration and wonder of the world.
GREAT MINDS THE FOUNTAIN OF ALL GOOD.
The Egyptians were also a maritime people who made voyages for discovery. It was under the instructions of one of its kings—Nechos—that some skilful Phœnician sailors first sailed round the coast of Africa. Six hundred years B.C. an attempt was also made to do what the French engineer Lesseps has since done—to cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. I mention these facts to show how all the really great things that have done the world most good have had their origin in some one great mind, who still lives in the immortality of his creations, having impressed himself inexpungibly upon the descent of the race and on civilization; and by this showing to call attention to the further fact that the number of the great who live in the present is extremely small, and finally to show that this country has not produced even one such mind outside the purely intellectual plane. The names of Fulton and Field will live until steam, as a motor power, shall be superseded by some more potent agent, and until the telegraphic wires shall be no longer required to transmit the thoughts of one to another at the antipodes of the earth; but in government the list is blank.
Our basis must, however, be made still broader. Greece was founded upon principles brought from Egypt; but in that small country a new era was born. Egyptian achievements were the culmination of an era of civilization of which Greece was fruit, and became the seed for the next. Not only did Greece dim the splendour of Egyptian warfare, but she also surpassed her in intellectual attainment. The names of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Xenophon, will live in philosophy as long as there is a literature; while Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Platea and Mycale will stand for ever unapproachable in military and naval glory, conclusive evidence of the power of order and organization over mere numbers and brute force.
THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.
There was, however, another power behind this one of order which made it invulnerable, irresistible. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, testified of this power in these words: “The eloquence of Demosthenes did me more harm than all the armies and fleets of the Athenians. His harangues are like machines of war, and batteries raised at a long distance, by which all my projects and enterprises are ruined. Had I been present and heard that vehement orator declaim, I should have been the first to conclude that it was necessary to declare war against me. Nor could I reach him with gold, for in this respect, by which I had gained so many cities, I found him invulnerable.” Antipater also said of the same power: “I value not the galleys nor armies of the Athenians. Demosthenes alone I fear. Without him the Athenians are no better than the meanest Greeks. It is he who rouses them from their lethargy and puts arms into their hands almost against their wills. Incessantly representing the battles of Marathon and Salamis, he transforms them into new men. Nothing escapes his penetrating eye, nor his consummate prudence. He foresees all our designs; he countermines all our projects and disconcerts us in everything. Did the Athenians confide in him and follow his advice we should be irredeemably undone.”
’Tis true that this was in the days of the declining Grecian glory; but it is none the less true that it was the same power in others previously that lifted a whole people to sublime achievements and into grand and noble character. It was here, also, that patriotism had birth; here that men devoted their lives to their country for the country’s sake rather than for private gain or glory. In this respect the character of Grecian generals and statesmen has never been approached by any other nation. It was this character that gave the Greeks as a nation, and to the world as an example, the first code of laws; gave a Constitution as a conservatory of the people’s rights, and made a Lycurgus possible, the principles of whose Spartan code are only now beginning to be appreciated. It is to this code that we must look as the prime source of political economy, and it has been the inspiration of all the modifications of laws ever made in the interests of the people. In this respect, Lycurgus will be known in the future ages as the Spartan law-giver of the world.
LESSONS FROM ROMAN HISTORY.
Roman history is a second edition of Grecian, enlarged in its sphere of operations, and in its influence over the world. Rome, however, would never have been possible, had Greece not first been a fact. But Rome was vitiated in the character of her public men, as compared with those of Greece, in about the same ratio that she was greater in other respects. Greece was the admiration of the world, but Rome was its astonishment. All that she was, sank with her as she went down into the dark ages. The best of what made Greece, still lives in the people of the world. Greece was the garden of modern civilization and will remain its inspiration until three elements of character—the religious, the intellectual and the social—shall join their powers to construct the future government of the world.
Charlemagne was the basis of the first great national character that evolved after the dark ages, and Otho the Great laid the foundation for the present dominance of Bismarck and Von Moltke in Central Europe. Cromwell, more than any other, is the inspiration of English character, modified by its respect for the political rights of women by the influence of Queen Elizabeth, under whom England reached the acme of its power and glory. But in French history is to be found the most distinct evidence of a communication to a whole people of the character of a single individual that there is to be found anywhere. The French character, both as a nation and as an individual, may be summed up in one word—Bonaparte. With the advent of this giant mind came a crisis over all modern Europe. Under his influence not only did the national character of the French people change, but the individual character also underwent many modifications. Nor was this confined to France, for this man’s genius was felt in every capital in the world. He conquered the nations and compelled them to change their laws, while to France he gave an entire new code, to which, more than to anything else, France owes her position among nations. It was the result of these laws that gave to France the capacity to rise from the disaster inflicted upon her by Prussia. Her immense loans came in small sums from the peasantry, and when paid will remain in France, which will not suffer the double impoverishment that most nations suffer from a public debt. The possibility of this was due to the far-reaching statesmanship of Napoleon Bonaparte, when he changed the laws regarding the inheritance of property, taking the estate from the deceased and dividing it equally among all the children—the greatest innovation that had ever been made upon the old feudal system, and together with other reforms, fixing France in a position to become more prosperous internally than any other European nation. Bonaparte also broke down the barriers that divided the nations and races of Europe, and opened up the way for closer commercial and literary relations, and performed, during the twenty years that he was in France, a greater service for the advancement of civilization than was ever performed by any other person who ever lived. In a sense, and in a good sense, too, it may be said that he dictated to the world, because the changes that he instituted and compelled have produced a modifying influence over the whole world. Taken as a whole, Bonaparte was the greatest man who ever lived. Certainly he equalled the greatest generals, and his campaigns, with those of Hannibal and Scipio-Africanus, will be the textbooks for military students as long as the art of war remains a study; while as a statesman he stands at the head of the greatest. He was Lycurgus, Alexander, Hannibal, Talleyrand, Bismarck combined. He represented, if he did not excel, the greatest of all ages, save Confucius and Jesus, save Demosthenes and Cicero. He never taught morality, per se, but he believed that a well-governed and industrially-thrifty people would necessarily be also moral, and he never made a speech except to point out the enemy to his soldiers. The treachery of a single man—Grouchy—who permitted Blucher to hurl the Prussian army unopposed upon his wearied troops after they had defeated Wellington at Waterloo, changed the whole future destiny of Europe, and prevented Bonaparte from becoming the beneficent law-giver of the world as he had been of France. For behind all his ambition in which only he is known to the world, and, therefore, not known at all, he had an unalterably fixed purpose to raise the common people of Europe to their proper position; but this he could do only by first conquering the rulers who stood in his way.